Denis MacEoin : The Trial of Georges Bensoussan

France's New Islamist Guillotine

The Trial of Georges Bensoussan

It is not racist to accuse
Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race.
This conflation of two very different things already causes endless
confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail
to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and
balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.

"Anti-racism... an instrument of intellectual terrorism has
become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism". — Georges
Bensoussan.

The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly built,
not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim
immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,

"To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk
means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a
transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I
maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught.
... I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish." — Georges Bensoussan.

"This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by
Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence.
Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were
Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times
more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole". — Georges Bensoussan.

Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim
countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur'an,
the Hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7th century onwards.

If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like
it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and succeed
in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the
stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

The French historian and philosopher Georges Bensoussan is best known
for his studies of matters relating to the Jewish world, on topics such
as the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the fate of the hundreds
of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries after the declaration
of Israel's independence in 1948 and the signal defeat of Arab armies
which invaded the new state between then and 1949. He himself was born
in Morocco in 1952, but moved with his family to France in his early
years.
After a doctorate in history from the University of Paris I in 1981,
Bensoussan became director of a journal for Holocaust history (Revue d'histoire de la Shoah)
and went on to develop a training service for Holocaust education. Over
the years, he has published several well-researched books on the
Holocaust, Zionism, and related topics. Juifs en pays arabes: Le grand déracinement 1850-1975
(2012) covers the too-little known history of the way in which nearly a
million Jews in Arab countries were reduced in fewer than thirty years
to about 5,000. His intellectual and political history of Zionism, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme 1860-1940 (2002), counters the modern use of the term Zionist as a pejorative.
Given these credentials as a leading opponent of Europe's oldest form
of racism, one might very well expect that Georges Bensoussan would be
one of the last people fit to be labelled a racist. And you would be
correct.

But on January 25, Bensoussan was obliged to present himself at
the 17th chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris to face a charge of "provocation of racial hatred" ("provocation à la haine raciale").
A more honest description of the charge would have read "provocation of
'Islamophobia'". It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing;
Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two
very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages
of justice.
The charge against Bensoussan was brought by the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France (CCIF)[1]
an Islamic activist organization that seeks to defend Muslims from
perceived attacks ("Islamophobia") in the secular system of the country.
Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction
between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of
some of their behavior and their religion. Leading the accusation in
court was a hijab-wearing woman, Lila Cherif, in charge of the CCIF's
legal team. On the public gallery sat an assemblage of anti-racist
organizations: SOS-Racisme, a much criticized French and international group, the prestigious Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme (LICRA), the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Mouvement contre racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peoples (MRAP) – which is part of the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine that supports trying to destroy Israel economically – and the anti-Israel League of Human Rights (Ligue des droits de l'homme).

Nowadays, there are several principal international definitions of anti-Semitism – the US State Department's "Working Definition" of Anti-Semitism, the original EU Monitoring Centre's "Working Definition", and the most widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Definition.
All three definitions include anti-Israel speech, writing and actions
as fully anti-Semitic, and it is on this basis that some of these
self-styled anti-racist groups may be described as anti-Semitic. In that
context, their presence in the public gallery may have much to do with
antagonism to Bensoussan's work in claiming anti-Semitism in his
writings.

According to Raphaëlle Bacqué, in Le Monde
on January 26, the specific charge against Bensoussan is based on a
couple of statements he made in 2015 during a radio broadcast in an
episode of Répliques, a much-respected program that discusses
current affairs, often linked to new publications by those interviewed.
The first statement was as follows (author's translation):

"Today, we find ourselves at the heart of the French
nation in the presence of another people, who take a backwards view of a
certain number of the democratic values which we have carried. There
will be no integration so long as we cannot rid ourselves of the
atavistic anti-Semitism which is hidden like a secret."

He then went on to say:

"An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great
courage, has just said in a film broadcast on France 3: 'It is a shame
that, in order to maintain this taboo, to know that in Arab families in
France – and everyone knows this but nobody wants to say it –
anti-Semitism is sucked in with a mother's milk.'"

Days later, Laacher, a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg,
denied that he had said this. Writing in the investigative journal Mediapart,
he sternly declared "I have never said nor written anything of this
ignominious nature". He condemned Bensoussan for suggesting that
Algerian anti-Semitism was created naturally, meaning racially. "How
could anyone believe for half a second that in these [Arab] families
that anti-Semitism is transmitted in the end through blood".
But that is not what Bensoussan had said. He had not mentioned blood, just transmission through a mother's milk.
Underneath Laacher's response, however, a commenter named Aimelle turned Laacher's remarks upside down, writing as follows:

Fallacious? Really?
Here is a record (including the "ums" and the repetitions of what M. Laacher said in the documentary (at the 56th minute):
"It is a monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism is
in the beginning domestic, and quite evidently, is without doubt
reinforced, hardened, legitimated, almost naturalized with various
distinctions um... externally. He will find it at home and will sense no
radical lack of continuity between home and the external environment.
Because the external environment, is, in reality, the most often
[experienced]. It is to be found in what are termed the ghettos, it
feels as though it is in the air one breathes, it is not at all strange.
And it is difficult to escape from it in those places, particularly
when you find it in yourself."
Certainly, he does not say "sucked in with a mother's milk" – an
expression which, in French, is a metaphor employed to define something
one acquires "in the atmosphere", "in the language", "on the tongue".
But the idea is much the same.

Bensoussan argued that "sucked from a mother's milk" and "transmitted
through blood" are not the same. His argument was based on Laacher's
own statements in that television documentary. Why Laacher reacted so
fiercely to Bensoussan's use of his own argument that Arab culture
fosters anti-Semitism, so far as to deny he had ever said anything like
that, is not easy to determine. Was it simply because he did not want to
be associated with views that might so easily have been interpreted (as
they were in Bensoussan's case) as racist in nature? In an interview with Alexandre Devecchio for Le Figaro,
published on the day his trial opened, Bensoussan argued that
anti-racism has been turned into an instrument that may be used to
silence "the majority of the French people". He speaks of "delinquent
anti-racism" ("l'antiracisme dévoyé"), and goes on to cite Elizabeth Badinter, an academic and, according to Jane Kramer writing in The New Yorker, France's "most influential intellectual",
who has spoken of "collaboration through anti-racism", using
"collaboration" in the French 1940s sense of collaboration with the
enemy.
He himself says this illuminates that

"anti-racism, this legitimate struggle, has been
progressively made a delinquent as the religion of anti-racism, indeed
an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest
channel of the new anti-Semitism".

To make things more difficult for Bensoussan, the charge of "racism"
was tangled up by the CCIF, who added to it a charge of being an
"Islamophobe". This, ironically, is quite unrelated to the Laaser
complaint, which is based on Arabs, not necessarily Muslims. But for
Muslim activists, it is possible to attack on both fronts, conflating
race and religion.

Because, as Bensoussan states, anti-racism is a form of religiosity
in France (and indeed in other Western countries), using that charge
serves effectively to intensify public outrage against any questioning
of Islam within important sectors in a country with growing
sensitivities about race-crime on the one hand and fear of Islamic
terrorism exemplified by the attacks in Paris and Nice.
The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly not so much
about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from
North Africa to integrate into French society, with its core
Enlightenment values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the country's motto.

Bensoussan has written two books on this subject: Les Territoires perdus de la République (2002) and Une France soumise: Les voix du refus (2017) ("Lost Territories of the Republic" and "A Submissive France: The Voices of Refusal")
In a long analytical interview with Caroline Valentin concerning Bensoussan's most recent book, Mathieu Bock-Côté (writing in Le journal de Montréal) summed up the issue:

"France is the principal theatre of the Islamist
offensive in Europe. In saying that, we are not only thinking of the
attacks which have marked the last two years, but of the creation on
French territory of a veritable counter-society which does not speak its
name and dissociates itself more and more from the nation. The
desertion of the elites, criticism of French identity, cultural and
physical insecurity, the increase of unreasonable compromises in schools
and hospitals: it is in order to analyze and denounce this sloppiness
that this book has appeared just now."

It is no secret that those who create this "counter-society" and
disaffiliation from the French nation state are disproportionately
Muslims – in this case mostly Muslims from North Africa – who refuse to
integrate or are deterred by their communities from doing so. Many
studies place the blame
for this lack of integration on the French state and racial
discrimination, and no doubt there is much truth in that. However, many
modern surveys in countries like the UK indicate that Muslims are the
hardest of all immigrant and minority groups to integrate, and that
increasing numbers choose not to. A recent example is the December 2016 report by Dame Louise Casey for the British government which, among much else, concluded:

Polling in 2015... showed that more than 55% of the
general public agreed that there was a fundamental clash between Islam
and the values of British society, while 46% of British Muslims felt
that being a Muslim in Britain was difficult due to prejudice against
Islam. We found a growing sense of grievance among sections of the
Muslim population, and a stronger sense of identification with the
plight of the 'Ummah', or global Muslim community. (pp. 12-13)

Bensoussan's argument that Muslim communities contribute to the
development of a society within society clearly attracted the attention
of the CCIF, which introduced the notion that he is both a racist and an
"Islamophobe". This opinion was reinforced when the lawyer for the CCIF
instrumentalized anti-Semitism as a further means of defaming
Bensoussan, saying that "What seems to us inadmissible is to attribute
anti-Semitism to all the members of a group. That is essentialism."
Essentialism here means defining an entire community with a single
"essential" characteristic. To this, Bensoussan makes his strongest
defence against that charge:

"To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's
mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken
of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission.
And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is
taught. I have not invented Mohamed Merah [who murdered seven people in
2012, including three children at a Jewish school, admitting to
anti-Semitic motives]. I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who,
after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish."

French
historian Georges Bensoussan has defended remarks he made about
anti-Semitism among French Muslims, saying: "To say that one drinks in
anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted
culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which
implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab
families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. I have not invented Mohamed
Merah". Merah murdered seven people in 2012, including children at a
Jewish school, admitting to anti-Semitic motives.

Bensoussan's claim of culturally-transmitted anti-Semitism in Muslim
and Arab communities is strongly backed by two important polls. The
Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) Global 100 report
on anti-Semitism worldwide gave figures for anti-Semitic attitudes in
16 Arab states, plus Turkey and Iran. The results are disturbing,
ranging from 93% for the West Bank and Gaza, and 92% in Iraq, through
ten countries scoring in the 80% to 90% range, four scoring in the 70%s,
and Turkey and Iran at the bottom, with 69% and 56% respectively. The
highest in Eastern Europe
was 45% (Poland) down to 13% (Czech Republic); in Western Europe, there
was only one high percentage, 69% for Greece, with figures from 37% for
France down to 4% for Sweden.

These figures are bolstered by a 2011 Pew Global survey,
which shows low figures for positive attitudes to Jews in Arab and
Muslim countries: Turkey 4%, Egypt and Jordan with 2% and so on in two
other Muslim states: Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim population)
at 9% and Pakistan at 2%. That shows three Muslim countries – i.e.
non-Arab states – with high levels of anti-Semitism. That in itself
shows that this has nothing to do with genetics, but relates to culture,
specifically Islamic culture.

"This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey
by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence.
Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were
Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times
more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole."

Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim
countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur'an,
the hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7th century onwards.[2]
Bensoussan has summed the matter up as follows:

"I am speaking about a cultural notion, not genetic. To
confuse milk and blood is bad faith or stupidity. Yes, in some Arab
families in France, anti-Semitism is passed on. To speak of a biological
anti-Semitism would take me back to deny thirty years of my work. What
culture can do, culture can undo; we can leave anti-Semitism behind. But
I have not invented Mohamed Merah nor the friends of his family who
expressed regret that he had not killed more Jewish children."

The verdict in the Bensoussan case will not be delivered until early
March. But whether he is found guilty or innocent, he has already joined
a long and growing list of Western thinkers and politicians who have
been put on trial and sometimes convicted for outspoken criticism of
Islam or criticism of some Muslim behavior, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, "Gregorius Nekschot", Lars Hedegaard, Michael Smith, Geert Wilders and others.

If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it
will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and possibly
succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat
to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

It could scarcely be more grotesque to find that a man who stands up
to the rampant anti-Semitism within the Muslim community is twisted into
the shape of a racist and purportedly an "Islamophobe".

Denis MacEoin (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1979, is a
commentator on matters related to Islam and is a Distinguished Senior
Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

[1] For a well-documented and highly critical evaluation of the Collectif in French, see here.[2] For a broad survey, see Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, USA, reprint ed. 2008.

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